Sunday, November 25, 2012

This article describes an overemphasis on athletics in our culture that impedes the spiritual, intellectual, and psychological growth of young people. It provides a wake-up call that many parents need to hear.

Shawn Worthy admits he's a competitive guy – and a competitive parent, sometimes.
Yet even he was floored when a couple of moms he met at a pro junior
golf tournament told him that their teen daughters would be entered in
30 such events this past summer.
"Why are these young ladies out on the golf course playing competitively four or five days a week?" Worthy asked himself.
His own 16-year-old daughter, Soleil, holds down a job while
participating in a few tournaments each summer. She and the other young
women are good, Worthy says, maybe talented enough to play in college.
But 30 tournaments?
"If you're a future Olympian, I get it. But for these kids who will
never reach that level, that's what I don't get," says Worthy, a
professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver with an interest in
sports psychology.
"What does it say about our culture that we go to this extreme?" he asks. "And that we push our kids to this extreme?"

It's not just golf. Many parents, coaches and researchers see a
steady upping of the ante in youth sports, with kids whose families can
afford the time and cost involved playing more, practicing more and
specializing in one sport at younger ages.

Parents are driven by a desire to help their children stand out and
the fear that, if they don't, their kids will be left behind. To keep
pace, they're often traveling hundreds if not thousands of miles a year
for games and tournaments. Some parents send their children to personal
trainers, or to the growing number of "elite" training facilities that
have opened in recent years.
Often, the goal is to simply land a spot on the local high school
team, an accomplishment once taken for granted. Or, a young person may
try to get on the roster in the growing private club team system – an
even more exclusive route that some top teenage athletes are choosing,
especially when high schools cut coaches and opportunities.
"It's an athletic arms race," says Scott VanderStoep, a psychology
professor at Hope College in Holland, Mich., who studies youth sports.
And it starts early.
"It sort of spreads throughout the community and then it reduces down
in age," VanderStoep says. "If it's OK for 14-year-olds, then it's OK
for a 12-year-old, or a 10-year-old."
How can this obsession with playing sports exist in a country where
the Centers for Disease Control say more than a third of young Americans
are overweight or obese? The juxtaposition seems unlikely, but a
longstanding survey from the National Sporting Goods Association found
that youth participation in most team sports has steadily dropped in the
last decade.
The number of 12- to 17-year-olds who played baseball in any kind of
setting has, for instance, dropped 36 percent from 2001 to 2011,
according to the survey. Basketball participation has dropped nearly 20
percent. Swimming and tackle football each dropped about 10 percent,
volleyball participation 2 percent and soccer 1.4 percent.
Nonetheless, it would be oversimplifying to say the United States has
become a nation of couch potatoes. Experts who track youth sports say
many young people simply don't have the chance to play, or resources to
do so.
Some schools in cash-strapped districts have cut back on sports and
physical education. And even in some wealthier districts, high school
populations have grown, leaving more kids to vie for fewer spots on
teams.
These dwindling opportunities have only fed the hyper-competitive
atmosphere, says VanderStoep, who admits that, as a dad of two daughters
who play volleyball, even he feels beholden to the system.
For his daughters, that has meant weight-lifting camps and
tournaments, required practices and schedules packed with games that
could be any night of the week – and have made it more difficult for his
youngest daughter to find the time to play other sports.
"You feel obligated to do it. You want to give your kids the
opportunity," he says. "And if they don't show up, they lose
opportunities to play."
Corinne Henson, a mom in suburban Chicago, knows about those hard
choices. Her sons, 11-year-old Tyler and 14-year-old Dylan, play
year-round baseball on different traveling teams and also manage to
squeeze in basketball and football for their local park district.
The boys do it because they love it – live for it, really.
"I wouldn't give up sports for anything," Dylan says as he sits on
the couch in his living room waiting for football practice to start.
"Me either," his younger brother quickly adds.
But there are sacrifices, especially for their parents. Time spent on
sports has meant giving up their longtime campsite in Indiana where
they'd kept a travel trailer. They simply have no time to go there. "Our
vacations are baseball trips," Henson says.
The toughest compromise came in July when their town, Oak Forest,
Ill., had a fundraiser for Dylan's best friend, who was seriously
injured when he was hit by a hit-and-run driver. Dylan, a catcher who is
captain of his traveling baseball team, had four tournament games that
day. He decided he had to be at the tournament, and showed up at the
fundraiser as it was wrapping up.
His friend understood. "I would have done the same thing," he told
Dylan. The traveling team won the tournament, likely because Dylan
stayed, his mom says.
"But it's so hard, as a parent."
There is, however, one rule in the Henson house that does not bend: "Homework first," says mom, who's a teacher.
And that's a perspective that Jon Butler, executive director of Pop
Warner Little Scholars, an international youth football and cheerleading
program, hears less and less.
He used to worry about overzealous coaches. But in more recent years,
he's watched as parents have clamored to find ways to improve their
children's athletic prowess. He says his advice to them – "don't hire a
speed coach, hire a tutor" – is often met with disgust.
"It's not what they want to hear," he says.
Bill Jaworski, a dad who's also a youth baseball coach in New Jersey,
says he is often "shocked and chagrined" at how easily some parents
lose perspective about their kids' sports.
"These are people you see at the pub, or on the train, or out on the
street. They're just normal folks – and then you get them to the game
and they turn into these rabid freakazoids," says Jaworski, a philosophy
professor at Fordham University.
He remembers learning baseball at the local park with friends or in
the back yard. Today, he's seeing kids as young as age 7 learning the
skills at elite training facilities, some that focus on specific sports
and others on overall fitness.
Billy Hirschfield, now 16, was 11 when his dad first took him to an
establishment called NX+Level, in Waukesha, Wis., a suburb of Milwaukee.
The atmosphere at NX+Level, can be intense.
Pro athletes train there. Signs on the gym walls say things like,
"You can only be a winner if you are willing to walk over the edge."
But it was exactly the kind of atmosphere Billy craved back then,
says his dad Ronnie Hirschfield. "He was a chunky kid, and he didn't
like that," dad says.
Today, his son is a high school junior and varsity football player being recruited by major college football teams.
Now a 6-foot-6, 270-pound defensive tackle and end, he's so big and
muscular – and so dedicated to his training – that his friends call him
"the freak."
"I never in a million years thought it would be like that," says his
dad, who figures he spends $8,000 to $10,000 a year on sports, including
training and travel to tournaments.
But, he adds, "Why wouldn't you spend that on your son to make him a
better person? And if he ends up walking away with a scholarship, it was
the best investment I could have ever made."
Brad Arnett, the owner of NX+Level, knows there are those who
question whether kids should train in his facility. But he makes it
clear that they have to want to be there, as Billy did.
"We don't bring them in and work them until they puke," Arnett says. "There is a means to an end."
He says training in a club like his helps kids develop more strength
and agility – and also avoid injury because they're in better shape.
But others think the training should be done in a different type of setting, with less emphasis on competitiveness.
"Things are going down a dangerous path," says David Finch, a
certified strength and conditioning specialist who recently left his job
as a school psychologist in Chicago to open his gym in Middleton, Wis.,
outside Madison.
If parents bring younger kids in, he often suggests learning a few overall fitness techniques and working on them at home.
He says the focus should be on fun and developing long-term healthy habits.
You'd be hard-pressed to find a parent who'd disagree with that. But
with competition all around, parents don't just worry about a child's
athletic career or getting into a good college. Many worry about getting
them into a decent elementary school.
Sports can be seen as a way to set a kid apart from the pack.
"You try and build the perfect kid," says Adam Naylor, a clinical
assistant professor of sports psychology at Boston University who works
with parents and athletes, some as young as age 12.
And that, he adds, can lead to "overtraining, overuse and an over-committed kid, which has fallout."
As psychologist Wendy Grolnick sees it, that's just parents doing
what they're wired to do – responding to a very primal instinct to
protect their children and ensure their survival."Parents love their
kids and they don't want them to miss out," says Grolnick, a professor
at Clark University who wrote the book "Pressured Parents, Stressed-out
Children: Dealing with Competition While Raising a Successful Child."
"There's just so much competition in the air," she says. "Very nice people are feeling this way."

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

We never see our 4 grandchildren anymore. They are gone almost every weekend with one or both parents at least one tournament. We complain, but their attitude is that if we want to see them we need to come to their games. It's hard for us to sit in bleachers or sit in 96 degree heat. And we don't get any quality time anyway because the children that aren't playing in the tournament say "hi" and then run off to play with the other kids they regularly see. It wasn't like this when we were small. We visited our grandparents every month, it was a 90 minute drive. I don't think we're teaching our children the important things anymore. It's sad. Thanks for the write-up.

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